20091011

I have several (really, a lot) of programs to compute different images for my article, amusement, anything. And all of them require a change-and-try approach for zooming. The first I wrote needed to be finished quickly... so I just hard-coded in the source the parameters. And this program turned to be the basis for all others... And now each zoom requires some calculations and recompile.A time ago I decided to do something about it. I wanted something to interact with my programs, as

they are already written,

most of them use pvm to work using 2 (or more) cores,

I want it cross-platform.

To the cross-platform part... I thought about a purely programming thing: either Tcl/Tk, maybe Glade, or use some Tcl bindings for Lisp and an interactor in pure Lisp, to a kind of web app... All seemed too cumbersome, or strange. And then it dawned on me: emacs.

Emacs can open images, has a full blown lisp dialect, can interact with those images... with the mouse... Here is what the beta does.

Drag and drop and zoom!

Load the image, and after a "drag and drop" on it, it is assumed you want to zoom that "square" (from edge to edge, turning it into a square). And reloads in the same buffer. Of course, the full-blown project is much much more exciting, with more options and what-not. But I have little time, and programming for work and programming for enjoyment is hard to combine.